What does Tribe teach about building a church?
Drawn from the message where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on building a church starts with a simple but uncomfortable question: who is actually doing the building? On Tribe's sixth birthday, Brian used 1 Chronicles 17 to hold that question in front of the congregation. David is settled in his palace, notices that God's presence is still living in a tent, and decides something needs to be done about it. The intention looks good. The prophet Nathan agrees on the spot. But that same night God sends Nathan back to correct himself, and the message he carries reframes everything. Brian says, "Many a work that was begun in the spirit ends in the flesh." The danger is not bad motives. It is getting out ahead of the Lord with something that may have even started as a God-given impulse.
What God says to David in response is not a rebuke so much as a reminder. He takes David back to where he found him, tending sheep, with no platform or pedigree, and rehearses what he had already accomplished through him. Then he turns the whole proposal around. David wanted to build God a house. God says he will build David a house, a dynasty, a lineage. Brian pointed to the way the same Hebrew word anchors both ends of the chapter. David begins seated in his own palace and ends seated before the Lord. Brian drew out the contrast directly: "David started seated in his own understanding, in his own wisdom, his own palace, his own kingdom that he had created." The movement the chapter is asking for is a movement from that posture to the second one.
For Tribe, this shapes how the church understands its own existence. The congregation was invited, on that birthday, to recommit to Jesus as the senior pastor of Tribe, the one doing the building. The passage in 1 Chronicles also carries what Brian called a hyperlink into the New Testament, through God's promise that one of David's sons would rule forever, a promise that points beyond David's line to something larger. The teaching holds those two things together: honest ambition for what a church could become, and the discipline of staying seated before the Lord rather than running ahead of him.
Taught from 1 Chronicles 17:1-16 · 2 Corinthians 9:6
“Many a work that was begun in the spirit ends in the flesh.”
From Happy Birthday Tribe!
The passage taught · 1 Chronicles 17:1-16
1 When David lived in his house, David said to Nathan the prophet, “Behold, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of Yahweh’s covenant is in a tent.”
2 Nathan said to David, “Do all that is in your heart; for God is with you.”
3 That same night, the word of God came to Nathan, saying,
4 “Go and tell David my servant, ‘Yahweh says, “You shall not build me a house to dwell in;
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- October 31, 2022 Happy Birthday Tribe! Tribe Church in Jackson Hole marks its sixth birthday by studying 1 Chronicles 17, where David learns that God builds the house, not the other way around.